Media Architectures

In Alice Springs on Under Today Project Development

I’ve been in Alice Springs working on the Under Today (working title) for almost two weeks now. Our time has been called an intensive for good reason. It’s been busy, exciting and sometimes exhausting working here in the late February heat at the edge of the desert.

Week One

On arriving on Monday the 23 February we got down to work in the afternoon with a meeting with Dani and myself to refresh on parts of the project from 2007 that we wanted to look at holding onto. Then there was an all team meeting for those of us in town Miriam, Frances, Mike and Kristy. Those involved in the last project also reflected on what resonated most strongly in the earlier work.

On Tuesday morning a group of us met at the site we will be working with Spencer Hill named after anthropologist Baldwin Spencer; the area is known as Tyuretye by the local Arrente people and is seen as a central and important area to the indigenous community.

While gathering for the meeting we found an amazing collection of caterpillars moving in a single line forming what looked like the ridges of a mountain range moving to clump into a pile at the base of a tree. A kettle of kites circled high above the hill on a thermal current.

We then walked through the site identifying areas of interest. There are structures and concrete footings visible at the base of the hill remnants of an army base used during the WWII over the period 1942-1945 The area was a camp for general transport companies involved in supporting the supplies route to Darwin and the top end of the Northern Territory. Most striking in these foundation remains is a small concrete slab building that looks as if it is occasionally inhabited at times. Following the site walk was a meeting with Dani to discuss possible visual ideas and then a generative rehearsal on site in the evening.

In the desert afternoon/evening light I shot stills of clothing discarded and decomposing in the landscape at the foot of the concrete building and the performers exploring the body in the space.

On Wednesday the 25th Dani and I worked together discussing images and projected texts, movement through the site, possible visual installations in the site and visual ideas to test and established this blog. In the evening a generative rehearsal on site had the performers exploring the architecture of the site. I tested out some visual ideas of shooting performers as if they were being pushed along the bed of the drain/trench at the bottom of the hill by water or some other force and also moving along the top edge of the drain; as the edge is often used as a walkway, bike path by people moving through the area.

On Thursday morning I took my partner Caolan and our 1 year old baby girl Mirrin out along the dry creek bed of the Todd River taking stills of clothes, boots and hats discarded in the landscape. There is an implied activity in these static objects dropped, thrown lost in action. In the afternoon I sent off some slides to be processed in Adelaide after discovering that there are no processing facilities in Alice Springs.

On Friday Mike Cawthorne, our project anthropologist, and I met with Greg Patterson at Land Information Services to discuss scanning aerial survey photographs of the site dating back to the 1940s. The surveys are basically flight paths over Alice Springs and the surrounding areas documented on medium format film prints. We are planning to use the images to show the subdivision and development of infrastructure around Spencer Hill and Eastside over time from the 1940s to the present.

On Sunday morning Dani, my daughter Mirrin and I drove out to meet Kumili Riley at Amoonguna Community to discuss the possibility of Kumili contributing her knowledge and memories to the project through an oral interview in English and Arrente. Kumili is an Arrente teacher and linguist based in Alice Springs and she has agreed to contribute to the project; this is completely exciting after hearing some of her thoughts, memories and cultural understanding and stories of the site and surrounding areas. In the afternoon Guy Webster our sound designer arrived from Brisbane and the project team met at Red Hot Arts.

At Red Hot Arts against a corrugated iron backdrop Miriam performed the piece that Dani and her had put together for the Art at the Heart Regional Art Conference which was performed at the Telegraph Station on the 4th of October 2008. Guy and I had contributed to this piece remotely by editing sound and video. It was great to get a sense of the piece minus the beautiful texture of the Telegraph Station walls. I found this image of the work on the conference website http://www.artattheheart.com.au.

In the meeting all team members spoke about what they had been doing in the first week of the project intensive period. After the meeting /rehearsal Mike and I explored the Picture NT and Picture Australia image databases searching for possible historic images to utilise in the project. One exciting image was an image from the 1940s of the Todd River and Army tents at the foot of Spencer Hill.

Week Two

On Monday Mike and I headed back to the Land Information Services and went through their records identifying flight runs that passed over Spencer Hill and Eastside. The file description looks like this “NTC843Run2Frame40-45” and describes what job/flight number it is and the run in the series of flight paths across the landscape and the frame numbers that cover the area of interest. I then went over to the Alice Springs library and met with Fiona the librarian who manages the Alice Collection, books and records specific to Alice Springs. Of particular interest was the “Historical Photograph Database” established by Geoff Purdie and Barry Alwright” in which they are scanning historical photos of Alice Springs held in private family collections. A number of images from this database are relevant to our project. In the evening I went back to Spencer Hill with Lucy, along for company and security in a lonely location, to take more images of clothes discarded in the landscape using a 35mm camera and also a medium format plastic camera known as a Diana.

On Tuesday morning I took some time out to put down on paper all of the visual/media ideas that have come up with so far and also to think through the logistical aspects of realising some of these ideas. I then cycled over to meet the rest of the group who were rehearsing at Frances’ house to discuss these ideas and the logistics. In the late afternoon /evening as the performers and Dani rehearsed on site Guy and I set off on a tip off from Francis in search of kites to film down the Charles Creek. We did find two kites flying high above the creek bed but the most amazing part of this walk was finding ourselves in the middle of a dust storm ripping through the dry creek bed, the wind singing in the trees.

On Wednesday afternoon I met Dani and Sylvia Neale at the Alice Springs library. Sylvia is the Indigenous Services Officer at the Library and also contributed to the first iteration of Under Today for the Shifting Ground Festival. She introduced as to some of the local data bases available through the library including the digital archive of the Alice Springs News and told us
a moving story of finding an article about her father, via the data base being wrongfully arrested for being in town without a permit. In the afternoon/ evening I filmed people traversing the top lip of the drain, at the foot of Spencer Hill walking their dogs, walking them selves and riding bikes along the edge. I also filmed Sylvia sitting and reading a book next to the concrete bunker structure as when she was a kid growing up on the Eastside she would come and sit and read in that spot. We also tested projecting some rough footage onto the drain bed.

On Thursday in the morning and evening I was back traversing the Todd river bed taking photos of discarded clothes. I was beginning to tire of this activity but then I would come across a unique assemblage and feel rewarded. In the afternoon I was back sifting through the Alice Collection “Historical Photograph Database” taking final notes on images of interest.

Friday brought a day of scanning at the Land Information Services, it takes about 20 mins to scan one image as I have decided to scan at a high resolution to enable me to utilise small sections of the aerials. After scanning most of the day there is still more that Mike and I have identified to scan at a later date. In the afternoon/evening I met with Guy and Dani at the site and spent time testing footage projected against the side and edge of the drain. Images of the texture of the drain bed projected back onto the drain bed were quite strong. An idea emerged from some of the interviews that Dani and Guy had conducted to project back onto the landscape native flora that had been pushed out by introduced species.

On Saturday we had the morning off and Caolan, Mirrin, Guy and I headed out from Alice Springs to Simpsons Gap and Ellery Creek Big Hole for a beautiful cooling swim. In the afternoon Guy and I documented on video a run through of all of the performance ideas that had developed over the intensive and went through what each of us was taking away to work on. Saturday evening was spent enjoying a dinner together at the Araluen Homestead where we have stayed on this trip. Sunday morning and Guy, Caolan, Mirrin and I were off to the airport heading home to Brisbane and Canberra.

n.b. I started writing this post whilst in Alice and have finished it off on my return home to Canberra.

Alexandra Gillespie

April 2009

Collars Opens at Canberra Contemporary Art Space

The full collars installation opened at Canberra Contemporary Artspace on Friday the 27th of March.
and runs until the 2nd of May.

The press release listing the other artists in the show at CCAS is below

“Introduced at the 2008 International Symposium of Electronic Art in Singapore, Collars, an immersive media installation by Canberra collaborators Alexandra Gillespie and Somaya Langely, can finally be seen in all its glory at Canberra Contemporary Art Space. With sound, LED text, and lots of imagination, Gillespie and Langley transform the humble neck piece into an installation of floating collars that symbolize power, control and memory.

In the Middlespace gallery CCAS presents a body of new work by painter Dionisia Salas Hammer, entitled 2009 A * C Odyssey. Dionisia is a recent graduate of the ANU School of Art who imagines how the earth’s geological formation might have looked if she were painting at the time of the big bang. Salas Hammer generates the exhilaration of creation itself while asking how the newly born imploding and exploding earth could be envisioned by means of abstraction.

Showing in the Cube gallery is Damaged Goods - a collection of assemblages by Melbourne based artist Mat de Moiser who uses consumer items such as Ikea furniture as the medium for his artwork. On one level it is a tongue in cheek look at the nature of art and consumerism. On a more serious level Damaged Goods reflects de Moisers’s Estonian heritage and memories of refugee grand parents whose first Australian house was built from re-purposed packing crates, with furnishings either donated by friends or salvaged from the local tip. ”

The installation was quite a marathon starting on Saturday the 21st of March and going until Friday the 27th of March. I feel as if I have been recovering for the the last 10 days. I am yet to get in there and document the show which I will do next week. The opening was great though and worth all the pain to see the work up and running and to hear the soundscape in all of it’s four channel glory for the first time.

Below are some pics from the installation and opening.

Since the opening I have given two talks on the work at the gallery on Tuesday March 31 to members of Dorkbot Canberra and on the morning of Thursday the 2nd of April to the staff and students of the photography and media arts department at ANU.

Dorkbot Canberra Exhibition

The Dorkbot Canberra exhibition opened Thursday 6th November. The show features work by the Canberra  chapter of the International Dorkbot organisation of ‘people doing strange things with electricity’. Dorkbot CBR (Canberra) was started by Tracey Meziane Benson and myself in December 2007 and we decided to celebrate a year of  talks and meeting once a month to hear about media arts practice and projects with an exhibition of members work.

The group of exhibiting artists are Clem Baker- Finch, Benjamin Forster, Alexandra Gillespie, Michael Honey, Tracey Meziane Benson, Nathan Mc Ginness, Miles Thorogood, Mitchell Whitelaw and Josh Wodak.

David Broker the Director of Canberra Contemporary Art Space opened the show and wrote the catalogue essay about the works. He had this to say about the Collars project which was exhibited as a group of six of the total group of twenty.

“The term “white collar crime” imbues a rather modest and entirely functional element of everyday wear with a status far beyond its station. At the centre of Collars, a work by Alexandra Gillespie and Somaya Langely is the symbolic significance of the collar in its role as an indicator of power, control and social stratification. In collaboration they have collected stories from significant others including friends, family and other artists. These stories are implanted in the collars, as it were; computer programmed electroluminescent lamps that project texts through the fabric. Through this multi-layered interconnected display of the technologies of spoken word, written word and symbolism, Gillespie and Langley literally shed light on complex personal narratives through the use of a deceptively simple, yet, loaded object, the collar.

In a recent interview actor Michael Douglas attempted to explain that he was not really a ‘white collar crim’ Gordon Gekko from the classic movie Wall Street (1987) and in the context of the current Wall Street Crash Gekko’s ‘greed is good’ philosophy is looking ever more shabby. “

David’s full essay on the dorkbot cbr show can be found here.

For this exhibition of  Collars we had accompanying sound for the first time. Six audio samples for each collar were selected and played back in a random order through four spatialised sound monitors when a collar switched on. The order of the collars switching on was determined by the conversational links, associations between the texts which illuminate in the collars.

My father in-law (out-law?) Quentin Mitchell is reunited with his collar in the image below.